“‘I will be their God, and they shall be My people.’
This is the great promise of the covenant with Abraham and with all the true Israel. It is one of the most comprehensive and frequently repeated promises of the Scriptures. (Gen. 17:8; Deut. 29:13; Jer. 31:33; Heb. 8:10)
There is unspeakably more in the promises of God than we are able to understand.
The promise that the nations should be blessed in the seed of Abraham, as unfolded in the New Testament, is found to comprehend all the blessings of redemption.
So the promise, “I will be their God, and they shall be My people,’ contains more than it has ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.
How low are our conceptions of God! Of necessity our conceptions of what it is to have a God, and that God, Jehovah, must be entirely inadequate.
It is not only to have an infinite protector and benefactor, but an infinite portion; an infinite object of love and confidence; an infinite source of knowledge and holiness.
It is for God to be to us what He designed to be when He created us after His image, and filled us with His fulness.
His people, are those whom hHe recognizes as His peculiar property, the objects of His love, and the recipients of His favours.”
–Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1891), 170–171. Hodge is commenting on 2 Corinthians 6:16.
